#7 Virtual Reality ain’t just for games anymore

#7 Virtual Reality ain’t just for games anymore

In this weeks show we talk about VR / AR. Why it’s taking off. Why it’s not just a toy. The difference between the use and capability. Thomas Edison and his sermons. The weird tricks your brain use to map your body. Simulation vs. reality. The ethical implications of VR / AR and who owns your avatar. How culture absorbs an idea. The future ideas for Engineering, Education, Medicine and Journalism and Micheál desire to have 32 screens in a virtual space.

Show Notes

There’s a story told of the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli that a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist that he suspected was not very good but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly “It is not even wrong”. For a theory even to be wrong, it must be predictive and testable and falsifiable. If it cannot be falsified – if it does not make some prediction that could in theory be tested and proven false – then it does not count as science.

“The mistake to make in looking at Edison’s recording technology would have been to argue about whether people wanted sermons – the mistake is to look only at the application that this technology is proposed to provide, and not the actual capability that has been created. Sermons might not work**, but sound is a big deal. ”